7 - Arctic Adventure Tales

Summary

Critical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular adventure fiction often focus on novels about forays into Africa. It is the aim of this chapter to show that the Arctic provided an alternative arena for such stories. In the first half of the chapter, the notion that the European settlers migrated from Greenland to other locations is discussed. Based on geophysical and geoclimatic theories that a navigable sea with habitable islands existed near the North Pole, it was hypothesised that the vanished settlers could have found a new home furhther north in the Arctic. The second half of the chapter examines how fiction writers drew on contemporary science to create what can be classified as the ‘lost colony’ story. In this type of popular fiction, it is imagined that descendants of the old Greenland settlers or other Norse explorers had survived in a hidden land. In some of the tales, the ideas of imperialism and exploitation of the Arctic become pronounced, thereby returning us to the fantasies discussed in the early chapters of the present book.